Lightsail Capital Management’s Q1 2019 Investor Letter

Lightsail Capital Management is a hedge fund that was launched last year by James Basili and Torin Eastburn. The fund usually looks for small public companies that are yet unrecognized by the market, and then invest them for a while through their growth period. Recently, Lightsail Capital Management released its Q1 2019 Investor Letter, a copy of which you can download below. In the letter, the fund posted the quarterly return of 13.6% net of fees, in line with the S&P 500, and a little behind the Russell 2000 Index, which delivered 14.6%.

“Dear Partners,

During the first quarter of 2019, Lightsail Partners produced a gain of 13.6% net of fees, with 71% of our capital invested, on average, throughout the period. This result compares to gains of 14.6% in the Russell 2000 index and 13.6% in the S&P 500 index for the quarter. Almost 60% of the quarter’s return was driven by gains in our large broadband investment and DIRTT, both of which saw positive developments during the first quarter (more on each below). Our other investments generally rose with the market.

Our partnership has delivered anannualized gain of 26.1% net of fees since its inception on April 16th, 2018; this is despite averaging only 55% of capital invested in securities. Our goal i to be fully invested, or close to it. This quarter, we invested an additional 15% of our capital, beginning the period with 63% invested and ending with 78% invested. However, our progress on this metric will not be linear, since good investments arrive (and leave, as Apptio and Invuity did) on their own time tables. Nevertheless we are making progress. As we wrote in our ​third quarter 2018 letter​,we continue to look very, very hard for investment decisions that are very, very easy.”

You can download a copy of Lightsail Capital Management’s Q1 2019 Investor Letter here:

Lightsail 1Q 2019 Letter

You can also see the list of our 2019 Q1 investor letters and download them on this page.